Common Functionality :
Tagging
Ability to add ad hoc metadata in the form of keywords to URLs
Categories
Ability to pre-determine a series of words or phrases under which URLs can be stored.
Descriptions
Ability to write a brief description of the content.
Syndication (RSS, Atom)
Various levels of output in the form of RSS or Atom feeds. These may include syndication of a user's bookmarks, a tag and/or category with a user's set of bookmarks, or a tag as used by all system users.
Posting bookmarklets
These are "widgets" that you can add to your browser that enable you to easily bookmark URLS directly to the service. Typically, other users create these widgets based on XYZ programming code and share them freely with other users. Some bookmarketlets provided additional functionality such as importing or exporting urls from the service to your desktop.
Sharing
Unless "private" functionality is offered, all bookmark collections in users accounts are visible to everyone who uses or visits the site. Some social bookmarking tools allow you to designate a particular URL as "private" so it is only visible to you.
Browse by tag/category
You can browse all bookmarks that are tagged with a particular tag within a service. This lets you see the entire collection of URLs related to topic. In some services, you can then examin specific users other bookmarks.
Subscribe to tags
This feature allows you, whether in the social bookmarking application itself or via RSS, to follow addition to a specific tag.
Subscribe to users
This feature allows you, whether in the social bookmarking application itself or via RSS, to follow addition to a specific user.
Integration with other tools
Related to 3rd party tools, add-ons and APIs, this indicates whether or not it is possibile to easily add the data or certain pieces of functionality of the social bookmarking tool to other applications. A common example of this is the ability to integrate a users del.icio.us account and daily links with the posts on their weblog.
Development of add-on, 3rd party tools
There are additional tools, functionality, and services built on top of the social bookmarking tool.
Import
The ability to easily add an existing list of bookmarks to the users account.
Export
The ability to easily export the existing list of bookmarks as either html or xml.
Publishing
The ability to make the lists available in another format on the web. This is commonly solved by enabling RSS feeds of user bookmarks.
Saves cache of webpage
The service saves the webpage so that it can be retrieved later, if the page no longer exists.
User Experience
Interface
Entirely subjective, this discusses the ease with which the interface can be approached and navigated.
Documentation
An evaluation of the services help documents, faq's, user forums and technical support. A review of tutorials or documentation developed by other users.
Technical (Under the Hood)
Open source
The source code is available for inspection, modification and use.
Closed source or propietary
The source code is not available for inspection, modification and use.
Open API
A standard method for accessing the data and a mechanism that allows applications to be built on top of the social bookmarking tool.
Meets usability criteria (for alternative browsing methods etc)
Settle on a service (bobby etc) and test the tools.
Reliability
Uptime, speed. The challenge here will be to find something that provides a measurement of this.
Integration with other tools
Duplicates above. Should it be here on in the above list.
Multilingual interface options
Not sure what I meant by this. Maybe the ability to create alternate ways to post to the site (see the various del.icio.us bookmarklets as an option)
Text reading options
Again, no guess on what I meant here.
Community
- Number of active users
- Number of links/bookmarks in system
- Sense of the content/topics collected
- Developers
- Support (financial or otherwise)
- Likely to be around in five years
posted by Horshan
@ 11:48 PM
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